Recall Procedure

Hoover Municipal Court’s warrant recall procedure is authorized by Alabama Legislative ACT 2005-188. Under this enactment defendants are able to pay an administrative fee to have their failure to appear arrest warrants recalled.

Criteria

In order to be eligible for this procedure, all of the following criteria must be met:

The arrest warrant must be for Failure to Appear; no other warrants are eligible for recall

The defendant must personally appear and pay $100 per outstanding failure to appear warrant at the time of recall, no other person can pay this fee on your behalf

Warrants that have been served are not eligible for recall

Requirements

Upon successfully recalling a failure to appear warrant, the defendant will no longer have to answer to the charge of failure to appear. The defendant may receive a new court date on the underlying charge, or may opt to plead guilty and pay the underlying charge if it is not a court required offense.

No defendant may recall a failure to appear warrant on any single charge more than once (for example: if a defendant fails to appear on a speeding ticket, receives a warrant, utilizes the warrant recall procedure to recall the warrant and receives a new court date, and then fails to appear again on the speeding charge, this new warrant will not be recallable). Similarly, a defendant who fails to appear at a court date on the charge of failure to appear will not be eligible for a warrant recall.

If your driver’s license has been suspended for failing to appear on a traffic ticket, merely recalling the warrant will not clear your license. You must take care of the underlying traffic charge first. At that point, the court will issue a clearance form notifying the state that you have satisfied the traffic offense. It will then be your responsibility to go through the state’s license reinstatement process.

In order to complete a warrant recall, municipal magistrates must be able to remove the defendants warrant from the state database. In certain circumstances, the state database my not be functioning. As a result, during such times, warrant recalls may not be available.

There is no guarantee a law enforcement officer will not stop you while driving to court. If you come into contact with law enforcement, they are under orders to arrest you while the warrant is active.

The same authority that empowers Hoover Municipal Court to allow warrant recalls does not, however, require the court to allow warrant recalls. Under certain circumstances, the court can refuse to accept the defendant’s request to recall his warrants.